The operative image of Sean Baker’s latest triumph takes place in the background of the film’s emotional highpoint. As Ani and Vanya celebrate their impulsive Vegas wedding, the camera continually places them against dazzling fireworks in the sky. Given the frenetic nature of Anora‘s first half, all fast cutting and legible but careening camerawork, it takes a few glances to ascertain the setting as an indoor mall, and the light show as “merely” a video display on the ceiling. The effect is somewhere between disappointment and wonder, a faked aesthetic adornment that, seen in the right light and mindset, is just as bewitching as the real thing.

Among his many preoccupations and pet themes, Baker has increasingly focused on the meeting points and gaps between fantasy and reality, and Anora registers as his most sustained, complex reckoning yet, despite the absence of escapist dream sequences like the ones that closed The Florida Project and Red Rocket. It’s too simplistic to designate the first half as fantastical and the second as realist—though the tone darkens and the camera locks down far more in the latter, it’s still punctuated with a great deal of slapstick and humor—but, in many ways, the structure acts as a conscious revision of the Cinderella tale briefly invoked in dialogue. Here, it is the prince who flees, and he takes all of the consciously extravagant trappings with him, leaving the viewer in something much slower, much more alive to the local color of each establishment that Ani and her quasi-kidnappers enter.

Mikey Madison absolutely makes the most of her vivid role, but it’s by design that, barring her fair share of outbursts, Ani is much more of an observer, letting more overtly garrulous figures like Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) and Toros (Karren Karagulian) shine at to her prompting as she attempts to absorb the dynamics of her situation. Given the extremity of his scenarios, Baker’s gift for pensiveness is continually under-appreciated, and his decision to mold Igor (Yura Borisov) into a taciturn companion in contemplation expands the inherent dynamics within each scene.

Without saying too much, the end of Anora magnifies all the loaded pleasures and pain involved in this narrative, where even a plainly humane act comes freighted with unpleasant associations. That Baker chooses to only further complicate them, then to conclude on such a note of quiet ambiguity, exemplifies the ever-shifting, devastating nature of this work.